Engaging Women in Environmental Activism: Recommendations for Rachel's Network

This 43-page report seeks to increase women’s environmental activism (including philanthropy) as well as raise their visibility within the environmental movement. The authors believe that there are relatively few women engaged in activism and political work around environmental issues and they hope that this report can help stimulate women’s overall levels of political and civic engagement.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), based in the United States, outlines key research findings from this report as a way to help Rachel’s Network in better understanding women’s attitudes toward the environment; engaging women in environmental activism; and developing potential partners among women’s organisations for building a coalition around environmentalism.

The key areas of the report are broken down into five parts which include: Women’s Attitudes Toward the Environment; Women’s Political Activism and the Environment; Strategies for Engaging Women in Environmental Activism; Best Bets for Alliances with Rachel’s Network; and Next Steps for Research.

The report suggests three areas that can help in developing strategies that engage women in environmental activism: 1) Creating an Effective Message; 2) Developing Other Political Strategies for Increasing Women’s Activism; 3) Using Effective Tools for Targeting the Media.

Several key findings in respect to women’s attitudes toward the environment include the following:

• Most men and women support increased government spending for the environment although women are less likely than men to support environmental spending cuts.
• Women are less sympathetic to business than men when it comes to environmental regulation — but they are also more likely to have no opinion
  about this issue.
• Women have more positive feelings about environmental activists than men do.
• Both women and men reject “jobs versus the environment” as a false choice.
• Women are particularly concerned about environmental problems that create risks for their health and safety, especially at the local level.
• Women’s higher levels of empathy, altruism, and personal responsibility make them more interested in environmentalism as a way to protect not only themselves and their families, but also others.
• Women who support feminist, peace, and other “progressive” causes are most receptive to environmentalism.

The report outlines a number of future research goals to help Rachel’s Network build support for its work particularly by appealing to its key constituencies. Two key recommendations include: conducting a "targeted set of focus groups on the messages that will appeal especially to higher income young professional women, both mothers and non-mothers, both traditional and feminist." The other recommendation includes conducting "a larger-scale poll of women’s attitudes toward the environment with questions designed to more fully assess the links between environmental activism, motherhood, and feminism, and/or to assess women’s interest in different kinds of environmental issues."